Had I a Hundred Mouths by William Goyen Page B

poetry, these students, this town, the depth of my loneliness and hunger?

T ONGUES OF M EN AND OF A NGELS
    I started out to tell about what became of two cousins and their uncle who loved them, according to what the older cousin told me. But some of their kinfolks’ lives would have to be told if you’re going to talk at all about the cousins and their uncle. So what I have to tell about first is all one family, what I heard told to me and what I watched happen. I have been here in this family’s town longer than any of the family, and have in my long time noted—and wonder if you have, ever—the turning around of some people’s lives, as if some force moved in them against their will: runaways suddenly arrived back, to the place they fled; berserk possessed people come serene; apparently Godblessed people overnight fall under malediction.
    J OE P ARRISH
    Blanch, Louetta’s mother, ran away from everybody—mama, papa, husband, child—with a good young Mexican that had worked on the East Texas place, named Juan Melendrez from the Rio Grande Valley. Blanch’s husband, Louetta’s father, named Joe Parrish, went loco at this. He was found lying in the mud of the pigpen, sockeyed and slobbering from what was thought to be a stroke, staring up at the mudcaked pigs grunting over him. And again, some fishermen came upon him prostrate in the steaming weeds of the river. Cottonmouth water moccasins glided all around him yet no snake bothered him. He’s gone crazy, said the town, and tried to persuade Blanch’s folks to put him in the insane asylum, but they would not. A black woman was brought by Kansas Tate to pull out the devils that had taken hold of Joe Parrish, but she said that they were deeper into him than any she had ever witnessed. She told how devils put roots into a person that thread around his liver and his lights and rope his heart and grow thorns into his lungs. This is why he foams and screams and pants for breath. But then Joe Parrish quieted for a while and sat on the porch, calm. Until one night he was missing. He was gone, leaving Louetta a tragic orphan in her grandparents’ house at fourteen.
    Now a lot of years later, Joe Parrish came back one night, and he wanted to see his daughter and to get her to help him, but found no one left on the place but the uncle. Joe Parrish told that he was escaped from the Penitentiary, a murderer-convict that had killed six Mexicans in the Rio Grande Valley. A winged man with black wings had come near him and unfurled and curled back again a thin black tongue like a horned toad’s and said, “Get even. Pay back the Mexicans.” Now he had broken out and had come back barefooted and in rags, wanting to hide on the place.
    When told that Louetta had drowned in the well, his old bedevilment took him again, and again the black-winged figure came and licked out his black tongue and suggested that at the bottom of the well Joe Parrish would possibly find better times for himself. Before the uncle’s eyes Joe Parrish lept into the very well, which had long been without water and was only a cistern of deep thick mud. Flashlights revealed only the yellow soles of Joe Parrishes naked feet lying on a floor of black mud, like a pair of turned-over houseshoes. When the rescuers, about fifty of them gathered from all over the county, threaded through the well-wheel a rope with an iron claw at the end of it and hooked it to Joe Parrishes feet (some said the claw looked like the Devil’s pitchfork but it was used to grab along the riverbottoms for bodies of the drowned) they strained together as if they were lifting an enormous bucket of wellwater. Suddenly there was a socking sound deep in the well and its echoing was a sound of horror, and then the tuggers, who had fallen back upon one another upon the ground, saw swaying at the crest of the well-wheel, dripping of mud and blood and clawed by the iron claw, two naked